How to build resilience

Resilience means being able to function under pressure. Pressure can come in many forms: bullying, lack of food, not enough time, missing information, compromised safety, and so on. To function means having sufficient resources to address the pressure existing at the time. The resources may not be directly related to the kind of pressure experienced, but they need to be enough for a work-around. For example, food may not be available right now, but if the body is generally healthy we can initiate some action to get some. Time may be too short, but if we are able to stall some scenario then the immediate pressure is lessened. This capacity to circumvent a problem is resilience.

Note that all this says nothing about the pressure itself; its seriousness, its source, any measures to prevent it next time. Here the focus is on resilience.

Since resilience stands next to resourcefulness, there is a trap. To illustrate take the following analogy from the building industry.

Let's say you are the Minister for Housing and the demand is to build more homes. The conventional way takes time and labour and the suggestion is to use pre-fabricated modules. As far as the scene at a construction site is concerned, when using the latter method time is now measured in months rather than years. However, the pre-fabricated modules have to be made somewhere, and that once again takes time and labour. Therefore in overall terms, unless the entire set of resources can be found to begin with, there still won't be any more homes. That imagined shortcut is a trap.

Something similar is at play when it comes to personal improvement. There is a multitude of offerings in the form of supplements, easy exercises, seemingly effective substitutes, all of which are meant to provide a shortcut to the 'perfect' self. They may be helpful in the short term but nothing more (which is the reason why the advice of a doctor should be sought to ensure such treatment does not interfere with the rest of the body). Human beings have not been designed in a lab or a gym. We are the product of millennia of evolution resulting in a metabolism balanced in terms of the environmental conditions across the time lines. That's why additional calcium intake can be useful for bone strength at the moment but for a resilient skeleton one needs exercise and a balanced diet. Swallowing a tablet feels easier than working up a sweat and that is the trap.

For the next step let's use bullying as an example; as far as its dramatic effects are concerned it's right up there. Bullying can happen at any time but it usually starts at school. Observe a not uncommon scenario. A bunch of kids is playing with a spider. If there is one child who is scared of spiders and openly displays that fear, and if there happens to be a bully in that group, that bully will seize on the other's reaction to tease the victim even more. In other words, bullies focus on a (perceived) weakness in their target and use it to their satisfaction. No weakness to seize upon, no satisfaction. (And by the way, the fear may well be the rational response to the fact that many spiders are highly venomous - Australia has some of the most dangerous ones. Here we are dealing with spiders per se)

In our case the most effective defence for the child victim in the long run will be to tone down the fear. Get closer and closer to a spider; handle a dead specimen at first; then a live one; get used to spiders. It's a gradual process, but as soon as the fear has been overcome (or at least has been subdued to a degree where the displayed reaction is not a given), the bully will no longer find the satisfaction once so readily provided by their victim.

That's where the resourcefulness mentioned earlier comes in. To overcome fear takes a considerable effort, that is resourcefulness, drawn from one's inner strengths which are not necessarily related to the object of fear itself. If the willingness exists, if the strengths are available, the result is success. If either are absent the problem is worse and what should happen next depends on the context. Still, in most cases the above will reduce the threat to manageable proportions and that has a flow-on effect in the positive just as trauma has a flow-on effect in the negative reaching far beyond the individual.

To build one's resourcefulness needs time; there are no simple shortcuts. Once achieved however, the individual is set up for life. Undermining the opportunities for resilience building (however well-meant the protectionism may have been) creates problems down the line and in the end everybody suffers.

Important! There may be times when during those resilience-building exercises others may want you to stop. Although it could be out of a genuine concern for your well-being, usually they object because with resilience comes freedom and they rather keep you in a state of dependence. Their ego feeds on the authority derived from general guardianship. Learning to resist such pressure is very much part of the exercise.

Update - April 2025:
In most cases the presentation of cognitive dynamics on these pages follows the Otoom model (ie, the mind seen as a dynamic, pattern-seeking, self-regulating system which evolves through the realisation of affinity relationships driven by stable, periodic, or strange attractors: The 10 axioms of Society). A reasonable approach, given the hundreds of confirmations attesting to the validity of the model at any scale (Parallels).

Sometimes the identified functionalities occur in patterns repeated over time, and therefore predictions can be made because the type of behaviour has remained the same. Just one example out of many would be 2050: Age of the Silverback. Written in December 2007, by the end of 2024 there have been 42 events bringing us ever closer towards that scenario (all are mentioned throughout the Parallels).

Every now and then there are developments where a particular aspect described here is suddenly being accentuated elsewhere to such a degree that it branches into new areas carried by a momentum of its own. This update is about one of those cases.

The other day Brisbane's Courier Mail carried an article [1] about money pledged in the runup to the upcoming federal elections. Out of those billion (that's one thousand million) dollars, 500 million are meant for Youth Specialist Care Centres for young people with "complex mental healthcare needs". The point right now is not about which political party promises this or that, or how realistic such pledges are in the first place; rather, a problem is seen to be of such proportions, a political party deems it advantageous to promise $500m of public funds in the form of a remedy.

Some indication of the scale of the issue is given in a previous article [2] by the same paper where a study has found "45.6% of the nation's youth" suffer from "chronic or developmental conditions".

Another article [3] highlights the number of children staying away from school after the Covid-19 lockdowns. The numbers are astonishing: Almost half a million children stay away regularly, nearly one in ten teenagers leave school before year 12, and an "estimated 80,000 kids [are] totally missing from the education system". We are informed there are children who struggled to go back to school and were given "therapy dogs" to overcome their anxiety. Apparently that type of canine is available at a Melbourne outfit called the Bayside School Refusal.

However sensationalist or otherwise one may consider the above texts, the statistics themselves would hardly have been made up. From the outset it is worthwhile remembering that this is Australia - not a country where famines leave dead bodies of children in their wake, where civil wars rage through entire towns, or where missiles at any time day or night turn buildings into tombs.

And yet - have a couple of weeks where "one-on-one communication with other kids" is not possible and the mother is "so angry", "still so angry" because it "changed their little personalities" and her children are now "gripped with anxiety". Faced with such a catastrophe others are rushing to the scene having formed something like the Bayside School Refusal along the way, stacked with cute dogs supposed to provide the mental strength for a child as the little person(ality) observes the success of their projection.

Then, come election time, and the prime minister (as it happens) finds it attractive to commit a billion dollars for mental health in general with 500 million of those for young people. Even if part of the target would be certain uninvited conditions for which a comprehensive health system should be in place, considering the very nature of the complaints as they have been publicised, that's still a lot of money for what could be described as self-inflicted wounds (and by the way, when genuine issues are sitting side by side the more construed variety, the latter tend to take what are ultimately limited resources away from the former - a deleterious consequence of egotism).

All this is aided and abetted by interest groups (going by the above articles) who see it as an opportunity to clamour for ever more funding; calls that quite evidently are responded to with fervour. And yet - the one protection against the ups and downs in daily life is personal resilience. This one factor has not been mentioned once in those tales of woe cited above; the one factor that has proven itself to be successful throughout the history of the human race. Then again, a successful strategy would probably not justify billion-dollar demands.

Let's reflect for a moment on the numbers cited in the Calls to act now to save kids in crisis piece [2]: just about half of the country's young people are beset with chronic or developmental conditions. For that to be true, either some disease has gripped society attacking its young, or there is something wrong with the numbers. Assuming the study's authors are numerate, there would have been a rather sudden outbreak of a condition not seen before in human history. After all, with half of its young rendered that seriously dysfunctional a species could hardly manage to survive. Which begs the question: As more and more components of our society become compromised, how long before the entire system collapses? (See The mechanics of chaos: a primer for the human mind about the demise of nonlinear systems)

Since there had been no famines, civil unrests, or wars, the mental state of children would have been induced by their immediate environment, which is to say, their parents. It would be the parents who first and foremost prepare the ground for their offspring to move into adulthood and carry on with life - a general process to be observed throughout the ages and across all cultures. In the absence of outside factors it is the parents who set the tone.

Over the past sixty years or so there has been one cultural change which has influenced the general ambience of childhood: the effects of feminism with its obsessively narcissistic elevation of the Child. The examples given in The not so hidden costs of feminism point to the innate nature of attitudes that have culminated in the conditions so vividly described in the studies mentioned above. That article was written in November 2012. The issues and the concerns referenced well over twenty years ago have remained the same. Since then the compromised children have grown into adults who have consequently fashioned their own descendants in turn.

Those adults are bound to find outlets for their dysfunction, and one area are the workplaces of school principals. The 2025 Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey [4] found "instances of physical violence increased 81.6 per cent since the survey started in 2011", and "threats of violence is also at its highest since inception"; "of those reporting threats of violence, 80.4 per cent were at the hands of students". Many of the surveyed principals intend to quit (53.2% in fact). We have arrived at a situation where some of the most experienced members within the education system want to leave because parents and students are out of control.

Such manifestations of anger and violence may not be an immediate fallout from a lack of resilience, but given the cognitive chain of events in terms of an individual's unpreparedness leading to frustration and eventually to an extreme response, their existence is highly significant in itself.

Sometimes the problem is not the child. At a Queensland high school a teacher acted like a cat; she wanted to be called "Miss Purr" by the pupils, wears cat ears, screeches and growls, and allegedly licks her hands [5]. "Miss Purr" no longer works in Queensland schools [6]. We can only hope this case is unique. On the other hand ...

When analysing human activity systems one of the most productive considerations stems from the question, what state of mind would be responsible for such and such a behaviour, and/or how is it possible for this state of mind to occur in a certain context? Unfortunately that kind of question is seldom asked because the answer requires additional resources to come by and in any case could be uncomfortable for the stake holders. Yet without those answers the necessary insights won't be forthcoming.

Such is the value of that approach, in accident investigations it is essential. Transposed into their context the question would be, what kind of action led to such and such outcome, and/or what conditions had been in place to allow this action to happen. Whether it was the crash of an aircraft, the disintegration of a machine, the collapse of a bridge, without such diligence we would be none the wiser.

Yet when ideological and/or political influences get to work the answers are studiously avoided and the problems escalate.

Or perhaps the actors had simply missed out on those billion dollars.

References:

1. M McCormack, Mental health pledge a $1bn win, The Courier Mail, 8 April 2025.

2. J Sinnerton, Calls to act now to save kids in crisis, The Courier Mail, 2 April 2025.

3. A Bissett, Kids vanish after Covid, The Courier Mail, 14 March 2025.

4. T Dicke, H Marsh, Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, Institute for Positive Psychology and Education (IPPE), Australian Catholic University, 31 March 2025, https://www.acu.edu.au/about-acu/news/2025/march/principals-navigate-growing-challenges-as-anxiety-depression-increase, accessed 15 April 2025.

5. D Clayton, Cat-ear teacher is feline confused, The Courier Mail, 8 February 2025.

6. D Clayton, Whiskered away from teaching, The Courier Mail, 11 February 2025.

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